ah, well. Matt and I went to a huge high school in North Texas, where he played football (wide receiver) and i was (am) a loser. he was a little bit legendary for some of his, hmm, shenanigans, so i guess this will have to be a thread. https://twitter.com/JaneAirgun/status/1330169010495885313

matt has always had a sort of odd sense of humor and a very serious, rigid notion of fairness, which had amounted to, among other things, a flyer campaign against academic decathlon, which he found to be misrepresented by the promotional materials

he also, i recall, ran for student council president — he wanted to change our school's mascot, which to be fair was a kind of caricature of a native american 'warrior' — but was thrown out of the race for arguably inflammatory campaign materials, e.g....

something along the lines of: matt bruenig is the only student council president candidate to openly disavow the third reich, which suggested that the other candidates, you know, possibly did not disavow the third reich. as you can imagine, some parents were a bit miffed

so this was sort of the rep there. but he was also in debate, and he was great at it. i was a novice debater, and he was varsity, so we didn't actually interact all that much, though i watched his practice rounds. he debated me for practice once and murdered me lol

now, i'm a simple person: i wanted to debate because it was fun, and so i could win trophies and make my parents proud of me. kids in debate also get a certain amount of autonomy that is hard to describe but very valuable to kids at that age. matt, on the other hand...

he was mainly in debate to try out arguments — oftentimes very strange ones — and to exact a kind of intellectual revenge on the rich kids from private schools who would show up to tournaments with, like, briefs purchased from law firms, six summers of camp experience, etc.

(worth noting here that our debate team only had like six people on it and only four who took it seriously; our coach was a theater guy the school forced to sponsor the debate team, and he was about 26 years old at the time. underdogs = understatement.)

anyway, a lot of tournaments in our region were varsity-only; they didn't have novice divisions. and he couldn't go to tournaments that started friday nights, because he had football. so for a while, i didn't get to see him in that context. but an opportunity arose

so i show up at this tournament basically wanting to talk to him. and between rounds, teams often play games or whatever to pass the time, because tournaments inevitably lag (esp in mixed novice/varsity tournaments, where they let people's moms run tabs for some reason)

and matt had brought Risk, the game, which i had never played before. he proposed that we (meaning the team) play while we waited for postings. i was in, enthusiastically — i mean i felt like, this is my chance! SIKE he dominated everyone ruthlessly lmao, no chatter at all

blah blah, more tournaments, similar interactions. one time he found a bunch of card stock on the floor at flower mound and gave it to me; i considered it good luck hence. now when we got back from tournaments, it was often after midnight. matt could drive; i couldn't.

so we get back after midnight one night, and i was supposed to call my mom to come pick me up, but i didn't want to wake her up. i shyly asked matt if he would drive me home, since i lived about 5 mins from him. he was like: sure. 1997 ford escort, stick shift.

so he drove me home, and we talked etc. we got to my house, and i kind of fiddled with my briefcase and said, sort of dejectedly, "you're not going to kiss me?" and he said something like "oh" as it dawned on him this was in fact why i kept talking to him etc.

the rest, as they say, is history. we got married, had kids, uhhhh made a podcast, and have had a lot of fun. here's to many happy returns. :)